“Only when they’re paying me to give them advice,” she said, not rising to him.
He stood up from his chair, getting ready to shout, or admonish her, or end her contract altogether - and then, his eyes fixing on something over her shoulder, sat down again, silently.
“Have I come in in the middle of something?” said a voice behind her - a woman’s voice, dry and steeped in money.
“Not at all,” said Marchant, changing gear to shift with no apparent effort into his usual tone of good-humoured superiority. “We were just finishing up.”
El turned around. Behind her, in the same severe eye-makeup she’d worn in the photo El had seen but with a t-shirt now advertising Nirvana rather than the Sisters of Mercy, was Marchant’s youngest child - his daughter, Harriet.
She looked from El to her father - scrutinising them both, weighing up the dynamic between them with undisguised interest.
“Should I wait, in that case?” she asked him.
“No need,” said El, standing. “I’m on my way out. Let’s catch up later, shall we?” she added, addressing Marchant but walking to the door and out into the corridor without waiting to hear his reply.
She felt Harriet’s eyes on her - curious, appraising - until the moment she stepped into the lift.
Chapter 19
St Luke’s Hospital, Islington
1996
The waiting area was uncomfortable, a shabby, humid testament to poor design: plastic chairs hard and ergonomically unsound, flakes of sickly pink paint peeling from the walls, thermostat turned up feverishly high. Its unpleasantness felt to El deliberate, engineered - a way, perhaps, to deter visitors from camping out there any longer than was absolutely necessary.
If it was deliberate, she thought, then the strategy was working. Besides her and Rose, only three other people occupied the twenty or so seats available: a crying boy, barely school-aged, held tight in the arms of a red-eyed man with a shaved head, and ten feet away, by the automatic doors, an old woman in a headscarf, staring blankly at the vending machine on the opposite side of the room.
“How much longer, do you think?” Rose asked, scratching nervously at her wrist. She’d covered her hair with one of Karen’s wool caps and borrowed a pair of Ruby’s sunglasses, but had made few concessions otherwise to modifying her appearance. El, conversely, was unrecognisable, every last vestige of herself - and of Alison Miller - buried under foundation, heavy biker boots, a short auburn wig and a grey zip-up top with a hood, shapeless enough to give no hint of the type or even the gender of the body inside.
If Marchant or one of his men came to the hospital - and she thought it unlikely, though not impossible that they would - they’d find nothing in her that they recognised.
“You know as much as I do,” El replied, keeping her tone carefully neutral to avoid drawing attention.
“You think it’s my fault,” Rose said. “What happened to her - you think that I’m responsible in some way.”
“Now isn’t the time for this conversation.”
“I would never have told her to go, if I’d had even the slightest sense that something like this would happen.”
“You don’t have to justify yourself to me.”
“Obviously I do, if you’re going to sit in judgement of me like this.”
“I’m not judging you,” El lied.
Rose’s shoulders sagged.
“I should have listened to Ruby, shouldn’t I?” she said.
“You and me both,” said El.
———
They were back in the kitchen at Ledbury Road, all of them but Karen, when he’d called.
“It’s mine,” Kat had said, pointing to the mobile Karen had bought her specifically for the job, the one whose number she’d given out to Marchant at Chestnut House.
None of them had expected him to ring it.
“What do I do?” she asked, to nobody in particular, as the little black box beeped and chirruped a digital approximation of a quacking duck - Karen’s idea of a joke, El assumed.
“Answer it,” said Rose quickly.
Kat didn’t hesitate.
“Jasmine Philips,” she said to the voice on the line - crisp but breathless, an exaggerated aural picture of well-bred femininity, and entirely unlike herself. “How can I help you?”
She’s not bad, El thought. Not bad at all.
The others, she saw, were watching Kat intently, their prior activities on pause - ears pricked, pens left to lie on notepads, coffee cups suspended between hands and mouths.
“Yes,” Kat was saying. “Yes, of course I remember. So lovely to hear from you.”
“What does he want?” mouthed Ruby.
Kat mimed a circular writing motion in the air with her thumb and forefinger.
Ruby passed her a pen; laid a pad of paper on the table next to her.
He wants to meet, Kat wrote, holding the pad up for the others to see.
Rose picked up a pen of her own.
Meet him, she wrote.
Kat looked at her for confirmation that this was really what she’d meant, what she really wanted Kat to do. Rose nodded; Kat shrugged, a wordless if you say so gesture, then nodded back.
“This evening sounds great,” she told Marchant. “Where did you have in mind?”
“What the bloody hell are you playing at?” hissed Ruby to Rose. “This wasn’t in the plan.”
“He thinks she’s a journalist,” Rose whispered. “He must want her at the press conference. A sympathetic ear for his campaign.”
“I don’t like it,” said Ruby. “El’s already told him she’s got him a load of them lined up. What does he need more for?”
“Because he likes control?” said Rose. “That shouldn’t be new information.”
But aren’t you the one, El thought, who keeps reminding everyone that he’s dangerous, that we need to watch ourselves around him? Maybe a little caution wouldn’t be the end of the world?
“I can’t say I know the place,” Kat was telling Marchant, “but I can certainly find it. What kind of time?”
“I don’t like it,” said Ruby again.
8pm tonight, Kat wrote on the pad. His country place - nr Berkhamsted. Still yes?
Still yes, wrote Rose.
———
The boy had stopped crying; had fallen asleep on the chest of the red-eyed man, who pulled intermittently at the loose skin of his cheeks to keep himself awake. The old woman in the headscarf kept her vigil by the entrance, barely blinking.
“I thought we’d miss something, if she didn’t go,” Rose said, somewhere between apologetic and defensive. “Something that we’d need to know.”
El couldn’t bring herself to reply.
———
“Have you lost all the sense God gave you, girl?” Ruby had said to Rose, after Kat hung up on Marchant. “He calls her out to his place in the middle of bloody nowhere for no good reason I can make out, and you tell her you’ll do her a packed lunch and pay for her petrol?”
“I don’t want us kept in the dark,” Rose said evenly. “If he has his own agenda for this press conference, one that El isn’t privy to, wouldn’t you rather we all knew now, rather than have it ambush us later?”
“And you reckon he’ll tell her, do you?” said Ruby, with a nod to Kat. “Some young tart who tried it on with him at his club? No offence,” she added.
“None taken,” said Kat wryly. “I do a pretty decent tart, if I say so myself.”
“I think we’ll know more if she meets him than we will if she doesn’t,” said Rose. “And I think that any information we can gather is potentially valuable to us. Which is why I’m suggesting that she go.”
“But darling,” said Sita to Rose, speaking for the first time since Marchant’s call, “are you not concerned that there might perhaps be an element of risk here, for Katherine if not for the rest of us? She may be the only person able to connect him to Henderson - El’s involvement notwithstanding. Might
he not conceive of her as another of his… problems to solve?”
His loose ends, El had thought. We’re all thinking it. Why not just say it?
“It’s probably a bloody trap, is what she means,” said Ruby. “And you’re sending her in like a lamb to the slaughter.”
“Oi!” said Kat, indignation hardening the musicality of her accent. “I can look after myself, you know. I’m not some fucking civilian, not like that one.”
She waved the pen in her hand at Hannah, who said nothing - probably wisely, El thought.
“No one is saying that, darling,” said Sita placatingly.
“You know better than anyone what he is,” said Ruby, eyes blazing and locked on Rose. “You want to be responsible for putting some other girl in that position?”
“It’s because I know what he is,” said Rose, her own eyes fixed on Ruby, “that I’m saying we ought to do this. I will not have us working blind if we can help it. Not on this.”
What the hell does that mean? El thought - conscious again of a subtext she couldn’t decipher, the weight of a different history than hers pressing down on the other women.
“And what about you?” Ruby said, rounding on El. “You’ve not said a word this whole time. Where do you stand on this?”
El considered the question.
“I think,” she said, the idea concretising as she formed the words, “that there might be another way. A better way than sending her in on her own.”
———
Time passed. The red-eyed man dozed, his arms still wrapped around the sleeping boy on his lap. The woman with the headscarf remained exactly where she was, still as marble.
Somewhere around what El took, from the faint light streaming in through the windows, to be sunrise, there was a nurse standing over them - a stocky white woman in a blue nylon uniform, bottle-blonde hair pulled back into a ponytail high and tight enough to flatten the lines from her forehead.
“Are you here to see Katherine Morgan?” she asked.
“Yes,” said Rose, clearing her throat.
“And you’re family, are you?” said the nurse, with the kind of weary scepticism El imagined she’d feel herself at the tail-end of a 12-hour shift.
“She’s our sister,” El said, sticking to the story they’d agreed upon on their way to the hospital. A wave of exhaustion rippled through her, hot and sickly.
“How is she?” said Rose. “Is she conscious?”
The nurse took in Rose’s expression, her palpable anxiety, and softened.
“Why don’t the two of you come with me,” she said, more kindly, “and we can talk in private?”
———
“What way is that, then?” Ruby had asked - crossing both arms over her stomach, ready for another confrontation.
El swallowed, suddenly aware of just how long it had been since she’d gone up against Ruby - or against Sita - and walked away the better for it.
“You’re worried about Kat going up to see him on her own, right?” she said. “So wouldn’t it make sense for one of you to drive her up there, so you’re watching out for her?”
A kind of awkwardness settled over the room; a metaphorical shuffling of feet at the suggestion.
“One of us?” said Ruby. “Not counting yourself in there, then?”
“I can’t chance him seeing me in the car with her, can I?” El said. “He knows me.”
“Look…” Ruby began, but Sita stopped her with a hand on the shoulder.
“I’m afraid,” Sita said, “that he may know us, too. Me and Rose and your Auntie Ruby. Well enough to recognise us, even from a distance.”
El thought back to the conversation she’d had with the older women in Ruby’s living room; to the specific words they’d used to describe their relationship with Marchant.
“I thought you only met him once or twice, years ago?” she said.
The older women exchanged another round of maddeningly uninterpretable looks.
“We did, and we didn’t,” said Ruby eventually.
“What the hell does that mean?” El said.
“It means it was a bloody long time ago, and there’s been a lot happened since,” said Ruby sharply. “And you watch your mouth, alright? Remember who you’re talking to.”
“And who’s that, exactly?” said El, temper rising. “Because I don’t seem to…”
A loud, unlikely banging cut her off mid-sentence; the sound of dull wood striking metal and reverberating.
“Thank you,” said Kat in the silence that followed - a wooden spoon gripped firmly in one of her hands, and a saucepan lid in another.
“Got something to say, have you?” said Ruby - but some of the fire had gone out of her, some of the fight.
“I do, as it happens,” Kat said, putting down the spoon, the makeshift gong. “Very nice of you to ask. What I wanted to say, before the four of you got carried away with yourselves, was: why doesn’t Hannah go with me?”
All four of them turned, almost in unison, to look at Hannah. She’d been sitting quietly at the table as they’d argued, making notes in her neat journalist’s shorthand - so quietly El came close to forgetting she was there at all.
“Me?” she said, startled.
“Why not?” asked Kat. “Marchant doesn’t know you, does he?”
Hannah lapsed back into quietness. Was she thinking? El wondered. Remembering?
“We met,” said Hannah softly. “Only once. At Justin’s funeral.”
“And would he know you, if he saw you? If we kitted you out a bit - changed your hair, that sort of thing?”
“No. Probably not.”
Kat spun around on her heels, looking at each of the women in turn.
“There you go then,” she said. “Problem solved.”
———
They followed the nurse out of the waiting room and down the connecting corridor - another pink-walled non-place, this one cluttered with empty trolley-beds and the skeletons of disused wheelchairs.
“Through here,” she said, guiding them into a side-room, very small but better-furnished, bookended by twin two-seater sofas and bathed in the glow of an inoffensive floor lamp.
It’s the bereavement room, El thought. The Death Room. She’s going to tell us Kat’s dead.
“What happened?” Rose demanded, evidently thinking something similar. “Is she…?”
“She’s out of theatre,” said the nurse. “She’s still unconscious, but that’s very much what we’d expect at this stage.”
“Then what are we doing here?” El asked, too tired for politeness. “Isn’t this where you bring people to break bad news?”
The nurse sighed.
“She’s out of theatre,” she repeated, “but she’s still in critical condition. The trauma to her head caused what we call an intracranial haemorrhage - bleeding inside the skull. It’s put a lot of pressure on her brain. Now, the doctors were able to relieve some of that pressure during surgery through a procedure called decompressive craniectomy,” she lingered over the words, drawing them out syllable by syllable, “but we won’t be in a position to assess her condition or get a sense of any complications until after she wakes up.”
Decompressive craniectomy, El repeated to herself, visualising the process with grotesque clarity. They cut out a piece of her skull.
“So she will wake up?” Rose said, pressing the nurse for more - more detail, more understanding, more of anything that might give reassurance.
The nurse grimaced.
“Truthfully,” she said, “we don’t know.”
———
Karen hadn’t been happy either, when she’d eventually made it back to Ledbury Road from Marchant Holdings.
“You let her go and meet him, just like that?” she said, incredulous. “What the fuck did you do that for?”
“He put us on the spot,” said Rose. “We had to make a decision.”
“And you didn’t think to run it past me first?”
“You
weren’t here. And we couldn’t very well have rung you at his office to get your opinion, could we?”
“I could’ve rigged her up with something. A camera, a wire… something. Anything would have been better than the nothing you gave her.”
“Hannah went with her,” said El, though it sounded weak even to her.
“Oh, did she?” said Karen, spitting sarcasm. “Well, that’s all right then, isn’t it? As long as you let her have the really big guns for backup.”
They barely spoke for the next few hours, although none of them seemed inclined to leave the house, or even the kitchen. Rose cleaned and tidied, wiping surfaces and rearranging the contents of drawers; Ruby nursed a cup of tea, while Sita read Kierkegaard in what El thought might have been Danish; Karen did something complicated with a screwdriver and a circuit board, electronic miscellany scattered on the floor around her as she worked. Resentment, agitation and barely-concealed tension hung over them, thick and membranous as a caul.
10 o’clock came, then 11. By midnight, El was debating whether to leave and check in again the morning.
At 12.15 the doorbell rang, and all hell broke loose.
———
They were allowed to keep the room - to stay in it as long as they needed to compose themselves.
“Just shout when you’re ready,” the nurse had said.
She’d closed the door behind her as she walked back out into the corridor, giving them the first semblance of privacy they’d had in hours.
“We’ll have to speak to her family,” said Rose. “There are no parents, not anymore, but she has at least one sister that I know of. She deserves to be told what’s going on.”
Sisters, El thought. I never even thought to ask if she had sisters. Or brothers, or aunts, or a pet hamster as a kid.
“Is she in London?” she said.
“Wales. In Holt, I believe. Not far from Wrexham - it’s where Kat grew up. And it’s virtually Manchester, so God knows how long it will take her to get here, even if the roads are clear.”
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